Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

(1830 - 1886)

Only
about a dozen of her own poems were published during Emily Dickinson's
lifetime, most of them anonymously and without her permission. Emily enjoyed
word-play and riddles, and fittingly so since she herself is something
of a riddle and a mystery. Her life is very much open to speculation,
legend and myth simply because little is known about it. The single known
existing photograph of her was taken when she was seventeen years old.
Her over 1,700 short poems were created without any apparent pattern or
progression, and they contain no titles or dates.

Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Her mother was Emily Norcross, and her father Edward Dickinson
was a prominent lawyer and businessman, and later a
Representative in Congress. Emily had an older brother named
Austin and a younger sister, Lavinia. The Dickinson family were
firm believers in education, for women as well as men. Emily's
grandfather had helped found Amherst College. Therefore, her
parents made sure she was educated in excellent schools such
as the Amherst Academy and later Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.
Dickinson has been described during her adolescent years as
a shy, demure, neatly dressed young woman often wearing or
bearing flowers.

“
Had we the first intimation of the Definition of Life, the calmest of us would be lunatics!
”
~ Dickinson in a letter to cousins ~

For unknown reasons, she left Holyoke after only one year, and
soon began restricting most of her social interaction to
members of her own family. Amherst at that time was a small town
greatly influenced by the railroad, the college, and by religion.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, this area had the
most ministers per capita in all of the U.S. As for Emily's own
thoughts on religion, it is said that although she sometimes
expressed doubts and seemed skeptical, she truly had strong
religious feelings.

In the late 1850's Dickinson seemed to truly find her poetic voice
in simple stanza ballad and hymn-like poems such as:

A thought went up my mind to-day
That I have had before,
But did not finish, some way back,
I could not fix the year,

Nor where it went, nor why it came
The second time to me,
Nor definitely, what it was,
Have I the Art to say.

But somewhere in my Soul, I know
I've met the Thing before;
It just reminded me--t'was all--
And came my way no more.

“
Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense, the starkest madness.
”
~ Emily Dickinson ~

It was around this time that Dickinson began sewing sheets of her
written poetry into small booklets or packets, called fascicles.
In the year 1862, Dickinson wrote a total of 366 poems, approximately one per day.
It was also during this year that she first contacted Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
after she read an article of his that encouraged unknown writers in their
craft. Her correspondence with Higginson continued throughout
her life, and she set him up as a mentor. When he finally met
Emily Dickinson one night at her home, Higginson wrote to his wife:
"I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much.
Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her."

Dickinson had many correspondences with prominent
journalists, editors and writers of the time, but met or spoke
with only a few. In her later years she would sometimes refuse to
see visitors that came to her home, only talking to them from behind
a door or shouting to them from upstairs. Her last known travels of
any distance were visits to a Boston doctor in 1864 and 1865
for eye troubles. After the late 1860's, she never left the
bounds of the
family property,
occupying herself with her poetry, letters, baking, and tending the family
garden.
The most prevalent speculation is that Emily Dickinson suffered from some form of
agoraphobia or anxiety disorder.

Although she became known as an eccentric recluse and
was called "the woman in white" (because she almost always
wore a white dress) by the people in Amherst, Dickinson must have
seemed more curious than terrifying. Local children enjoyed it when
she lowered treats and snacks out her second-floor
bedroom
window inside a basket tied to a rope. Usually they would only glimpse
her hands and arms, as she was careful not to show her face.

“
To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.
”
~ Dickinson on Nature ~

Over the years she continued her poetry and her correspondence.
There is speculation that Emily had something of a love affair
(through letters alone) with Judge Otis P. Lord of the Massachusetts
Supreme Court, starting in about 1878. He died in 1884, and
thereafter Dickinson herself seemed to grow obsessed with death.

Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn
Indicative that suns go down;
The notice to the startled grass
That darkness is about to pass.

Emily Dickinson
died
on May 15, 1886 at the age of 55, from what is described
as "Bright's Disease" -- which is not truly a disease but
a term that was used for a collection of medical symptoms
including nephritis (kidney disease) and hypertension.
Because she had requested it, her sister Lavinia destroyed most of
Emily's letters. Fortunately, the plenteous sheets of poetry
were preserved and eventually published, giving the gifted
"eccentric recluse" of Amherst her ever-after posthumous fame.

Though generally overlooked during her lifetime, Emily Dickinson's poetry has achieved acclaim due to her experiments in prosody, her tragic vision and the range of her emotional and intellectual explorations.

Between them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche....

Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone.

Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.

In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from h...